Dear dimwit on the phone

That's probably because he calls them "points."

 

People come by asking for a Monday edition we haven't printed in about five years. In additon, a competing weekly paper started up about six weeks ago. People come to our office to buy a copy of it, which is sort of ironic in that it was started because of a "groundswell of support for a locally-owned community newspaper."

 

I had a photographer who did that in cutlines. Over and over and over.

 

When we dropped our Sunday paper a few years back, had to cut way back on college football coverage, save for Local U. Had one guy who claimed we "owed" him two days worth of coverage, then added "Well, if you're going to cover one team, make it BCS Tech!"

Uh, guy, look around ... Local U is 40 miles away, BCS Tech 300 or so. There might be a bit more interest. And did you ever hear of the NFL? And if you really are a big BCS Tech fan and don't know how they did by Monday afternoon, that's your problem, not mine!

 

Just took this call from the mother of a freshman baseball player:

Her: "You had he was 2-for-3 with an RBI. He was 3-for-3 with 2 RBIs, you need to make a correction."
Me: "Well, that's what the coach reported."
Her: "Well, my husband said my son should have been credited for another hit and an RBI, so you need to make a correction."
Me: "Is your husband the coach, or the official scorer?
Her: "No, but he knows a lot about baseball."

 

Dear parents of a local team,

Why is it that you think that because we haven't covered your kids' team as much as you would like that sending us repeated emails bitching about that is going to make us go out of our way to cover them?

Here are the facts: Your kids' teams both suck and are only "winning" because they're in the state's lowest division. Also, we've covered the boys team twice and had three different games rained out on us. The girls team, meanwhile, has been covered by us five times.

I mention this to ask you what other newspaper is covering them more? Is it the rival weekly? Nope. They don't cover games anymore. Is the the local Patch site? Doubtful since they appear to have stopped covering sports altogether. Is it the state's daily paper? Nope. They don't travel south of the capital city.

So, please, stop complaining. We're going to cover what we can cover based on schedules, availability, interest and newsworthiness. We are not going to cover your kids' teams simply because you happened to bust a nut 16 years ago and you think you deserve attention for it now.

F**k yourself,

-Schieza

 

Well said, sir. I've had to deal with this type of caller a lot.

 

Do I pay your salary? OK, then you have to deal with me.

MLB boxes in the newspaper just got moved to hospice care. It'll die peacefully in its sleep this fall.

 

Once covered a prep football game and a kid rushed for 200 yards and scored two touchdowns. He had a quite a game, too, on special teams; he returned two kickoffs for TDs and had about 250 yards in returns.

Coach bitches at my editor the next morning, claiming the kid rushed for 450 yards and four TDs, which would've been some sort of state record and demanded a correction. When I came in later, I gave the SE my play-by-play and he went through it. When he discovered the 450 was actually all-purpose yards, he called the coach back and called him a moron in so many words.

 

I apologize in advance for the length of this story, but I feel it's relevant. And I may have posted this on some other thread a while back, so if you've read it, sorry again.

At my first job out of college I covered a small high school. In one of their football games, it was basically these two opposing running backs carrying the ball down the field for touchdowns on consecutive series over and over and over. At the end of the game, the stringer for Big Town Daily an hour down the road, for which the visiting team was local, asks me what I've got for rushing yards on those two RBs. I ended up with something like 280 for one and 290 for the other, which was pretty massive and added up to a little under 600 combined yards.

The next day I come in to the office and see Big Town Daily's edition has a story that has these two kids combining for something like 725 yards. At first I freaked out thinking I made a mistake, but I went back and went over my play-by-play, added up everything four or five times and still came nowhere near making up for a missing 150 yards. When my editor came in, I showed him my math and we agreed it was probably a mistake on the Big Town Daily's part. By Monday, one of the state's big papers' preps guru points out this is a new state record for rushing yards in a game between opposing running backs, and by Tuesday when I worked next, I had several emails and voice mails complaining I shortchanged the kids and ruined their glorious moment and all that. By then the executive editor then heard a complaint about it and, in not so many words, told me I was probably wrong and to correct it. So on Tuesday I go out to the school and talk to the coach, who says he watched the video and, yes, it was 725 yards but, no, he cannot show me the video. Please? No, our policy is not to share game video with the media, he say. I should point out that we were the only paper that regularly covered them and Big Town Daily only ever swooped in when one of their core coverage teams traveled up that way.

Being young and naive, I half trust the coach, who was a decent guy. I go back to my editors, tell them what he said and they agree I must have been wrong. I write a column the next day on the topic, saying the coach backed those numbers up and congrats on the state record, and the next time I go out to the school, a few parents thank me for handling that so professionally, which was sort of nice considering I was furious over this inside.

Eventually it blows over, but about six months later I happen to talk to Big Town Daily's SE for the first time and mention that story to him. He says something like, "Oh, we don't even use that stringer any more because every week he had some giant error in his stories. You were probably right." A small victory.

Then, about a year ago - which is probably five years after that all happened - I Google that RB I covered wondering if he ever went on to play college football. One of the first results is a video of every rush of that game, and in the description it says, "This is what 725 yards and a state record looks like," or something to that effect.

I watch the video and add up every single rushing yard, and it turns out I was right all along as the rushing yards, even adding in an extra yard or two here and there because I can't see all the lines in a grainy video, I'm within a few yards of what I wrote in my original gamer.

 

I pitched a fit a few years ago when it came to running corrections on agate. With as many names and numbers as we deal with on an average shift, I'm amazed we get as much right as we do.

So Little Johnny Bedwetter shot an 88 instead of an 89 at state golf? Or the names was "Johnnie" instead of "Johnny" or "Jhonny"? I mean, c'mon folks, we try really, really hard, but when you are dealing with 100+ names --- man, I hate track --- chances are you're not batting 1.000.

Reminds me of one writer who referred to certain track and field event as the "shit put". Well, it happens. Life goes on. We'll try and do better the next time. In the meantime, I've been of the mindset that the more corrections you run, the more it undermines your credibility. Sure you need to correct the major, factual stuff. But when I see a page with 6 different corrections from the previous day's edition, I wonder what the staff was drinking.

 

This is what happens when one puts too much of an emphasis on stats. Unless there is an official stat keeper designated by the host school (and he/she gets me those numbers within five minutes after the horn sounds), then my stats are official for our publication.